The Beale Papers (The Beale Treasure)

The Beale Papers are a set of so-called authentic statements about three ciphers, the first of which allegedly states the precise location of a treasure vault, which contains gold, silver and jewels estimated to be worth over USD$60 million. The second cipher, already solved, gives the contents of the vault which it says is four miles from Buford Tavern, in Bedford County, Virginia. The third cipher gives a list of names of the next of kin of the owners of the treasure. The story of the three Beale ciphers was made public in an 1885 pamphlet printed in Lynchburg by an agent for the one who first got the ciphers and alledgedly solved the cipher No. 2. It said the silver and gold treasure was buried near the Twin Peaks of Otter, by a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale. He had chosen a secret location not far from Buford’s Tavern, in Bedford County, Virginia. Before he set out from Buford for a third expedition to the Santa Fe area he entrusted a strongbox with the innkeeper named Robert Morriss. He gave Morriss the instruction to keep it until he retuned and called for it. The box only contained some letters and three encrypted messages. But Beale never did return to claim the strongbox. After a time of more than twenty years and shortly before he died the innkeeper passed the strongbox with its contents to a friend. This friend of his, James B. Ward, then spent the next twenty years of his life trying to break the ciphers. He was able to solve one of them, the one called No. 2, which gave a detailed list of the contents of the buried treasure plus the general location of the vault. In 1885 Ward finally gave up and published all three ciphers in a pamphlet, wishing that someone deserving would be able to solve the remaining two. This has not happened. A scholarly analysis of the letters and ciphers, using historical records, has alledged the ciphers and letters could be a fraud. They could not have been written in 1821 since some words used, for instance, ‘stampeding’, were not known in 1821. Also the writing style seems to indicate that it was James B. Ward also wrote the so-called Beale letters and launched the adventure story in his 1885 pamphlet. But other historians and cipher experts disagree with these conclusions, pointing to the fact that more than one adventurous group of young men went west at that time, to explore the new territories just opened, to hunt, and to look for treasures. That Beale and his associates could have found gold and silver in the rich fields north of Santa Fe is quite possible.